At the Strike of Twelve (Home is Where the Heart is)
by ohmygoshwhatascream
Summary: "For a long time, I believed that if you put your ear to the ground, you'd hear the worlds heart beating. That the world goes on living, whether you were there or not." Soon we will all be gone, and only the abyss will remain. (Cross-posted on ao3)


The heart is undeniably one of the most important things in our bodies.  
It's the little clock within us all, the one that beats until - eventually - our time grows short and our souls escape, leaving empty cases of what we once were behind.

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Practically, it is the thing that pumps blood to our muscles, sending oxygen to our brains; the thing that gives us the chance to talk and move and laugh and cry.

It's basic science - respiration; we take the oxygen in, our hearts feed it to our bodies and we are gifted with the ability to live. We breathe out the carbon dioxide, our own kind poison that forever lives around us around us.  
Of course, the plants are supposed to get rid of it then. They use our toxins and the suns light to grow green and strong, but plants don't survive without water and it's not rained for years in these cursed lands.  
Regardless, like clockwork, each and every day, our bodies do it without a second thought, they save our lives and we don't even realise it.

Why would we?

It's involuntary, something that we do because we need it to survive.  
You don't realise you're doing it, because your body does the thinking for you.

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People never realise quite how amazing we truly are, how are bodies are somehow so basic, so easy to comprehend, yet simultaneously our abilities to destroy and create and to learn and understand make us more like magic, something indescribable and strange.

Our hearts are systematic, programmed and somethings thag remains constant in our lives, they do the same things days in and out, yet they are woven into our bodies like strands of fairy dust and sparkles of magic.

But soon, one day, the hands on our clocks will become aged and wither along with our bodies, before long oxygen will forever leave our lungs, our last breath spent and our soul somewhere better than here. We will die, and we will return to the corrupted land that we live on.

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We will be left, abandoned.  
Just like the Gods abandoned us.

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Of course, the heart is said to control other things things.

Such as love, shown in simple ways like the hearts we drew in bright red in the corners of pages and dancing around the names of those we came to hold dearly, but also through the ways that your mother and father grew thinner and fainter with each passing day, and their bread would be halved as they told you they had eaten earlier, when you weren't looking. (Lies, lies that they told you because they wanted you to have something to remember fondly as you came to realise the horrors of the land you are confined in)

Compassion, the desire to help and protect those who need it, like comforting an upset friend, or placing a blanket over your dead husband so your dear child won't be scared with his lifeless eyes when their minds are far too young to understand the realities of a place with nothing but suffering left. (But it all meant nothing when you would reach the age of ten and realise that it was only you. Everyone else had been taken from you)

Kindness, the ability to give to others and expect nothing in return, to be kind because that is how you are made, not the kindness that runs rampant through the villages, the cunning sort of care that ended with your throat being slit and your clothes stripped off you as desparate people stole anything off your lifeless body that they thought they could trade for clean water or a slice of apple that wasn't rotted to the very core. (Food was scarce, warm clothes were even scarcer. The house you lived in now had once been home to a young couple, you remembered burying their frozen bodies in the back garden, their faces disgustingly thin and their eyes gaunt and pained. Even in death, happiness was something unobtainable.)

The problem is that people don't realise how important the heart is until it's no longer there.

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Lorule's heart beats, slowly, softly, gently.

It's faint, like an animal that's gradually bleeding out, red pouring in clumps onto dead grass and deep, pitiful whines of something that just wants it to all end.

The Triforce was the land's oxygen - its life force,  
Something that it needed, something that made the sun rise like a golden halo and made water that revitalise yellowed grass and withered trees.

But with it gone, the world was confined.

Confined to tiny rooms, shut off from the rest of the world.

We, the remaining inhabitants of Lorule, are doomed to live knowing that every second that passes by, our oxygen, the remaining power of the Triforce, depletes.

The esssense of our fading lives is sucked into Lorule's desperate mouth, and the land breathes out poison.

Death, destruction, the evil that our ancestors had once feared so much, was now the only thing we had left.

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The heart is supposed to be the thing keeps us going.  
But now it's falling into the deep abyss.

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The ground crumbles and buildings collapse like shattered glass, they tumble off the edges of jagged rocks and we watch them fall into deep pit space of nothingness, the void.

Your brother goes out one day, to scavenge for food.  
He doesn't come back, and the news that another part of the village has completely disappeared, broken off into the pit, does not shock you.

It wasn't not the first death by that nature, not by a long shot, it certainly wouldn't be the last.

The world was turning into dust, the abyss growing and your home disappearing around you.

You don't blink when the walls of your house begin to tremble and crack.

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With the Triforce gone, the air stifling and suffocating, Lorule can do nothing but absorb all that it has left.

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We are all that remains in this forsaken land.  
Long ago, those before us cut off the light in Lorule.

Now we must pay the price.

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You don't panic as you see the ground beneath your feet split, or as the remains of your house fall down around you.

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We will be the last ones.

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Soon, the clock will strike twelve.  
And just like long forgotten tales, we will fade into nothing like glass slippers and golden carriages.

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The ground opens you up, and Lorule swallows you whole.

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Very, very faintly, deep within the void, you can hear something.

.

Lorule's heart beats.

It won't stop until we are all gone.


End file.
